Friday, August 12, 2005

Something else to worry about...

Pacific Rim nations pushing ahead of U.S. in engineering: "'Our ability to innovate in this country is diminishing. If you look at the number of patents, they are shifting now to other places. Scientific papers that are published, citations - we are clearly losing ground in terms of the competitive stance we've had,' said Don Giddens, the dean of the College of Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which ranks among the nation's top five engineering schools."

The more engineers the better. Knowledge is unique in that it can benefit many different parties at the same time. If you use/steal someone's land the original owner is hurt because they can no longer use their land. If you use someone else’s knowledge, the original producer of that knowledge need not be hurt at all.

Japan or China is not hurt when Intel invents a new semi-conductor in Silicon Valley. On the contrary, they benefit.

The more engineers the better. We could distribute the workload. Let Japan work on robotics, the US can do nanotechnology, and China can do its thing. In the end we’ll all get the fabulous new technologies of the future even faster.

With Primates, brain size can be attributed to the size of the social group. Humans of course having the largest brain, also had the largest social group. Through language and culture we were able to expand our social group to not only long distances but to our past as well. Globalization will merely expand our social group making us more intelligent.

The Pacific Rim vs the United States!? Imagine that! A while back, you wondered how NASA went from 1958 to a man on the moon in 1969? one word, competition, Russia. Or you can look towards the human genome project, government vs private which took a 12 year project and make it 2 :)

I forget where I read it, but Computer Science graduate numbers are going the same way. I guess we are seeing less engineers and programmers hopefuls is because we are told not to innovate or we will be sued because someone innovated something similar six months ago and got a piece of paper with a number that says he owns that idea. Or is it the news of layoffs, offshoring, and lawsuits and it scares them away from wanting to take on these sorts of jobs. That, and it seems the pools of companies in the US that innovate before market feasibility analysis is done are diminishing. The bulk of the jobs get shunted into boxes where innovation is a risk and risks are dangerous to the bottom line.

China will win as we are drowning.

We would never make it to the moon if we tried now as some microscopic company that only exists to hold patents would own the one for a system of propelling a large object into orbit. Another would hold the patent for containing life support systems in an oxygen free environment. A third would have a patent for a process of deploying a landing vehicle from orbit onto a large body. Each would wait until NASA created the rocket and then sued after the fact and drained NASA's budget.